Classics Faculty, Students Really Dig Their Work in Turkey

A Case Western Reserve University assistant professor has turned the rugged terrain of Turkey's
Taurus Mountains into a hands-on learning center for archaeological fieldwork.

The research team searched for antiquities in Turkey's Taurus Mountains.

With the help of former visiting assistant professor Andrea De Giorgi, now at Rutgers University, Paul Iversen of the Department of Classics
and a team of four students over the summer searched for antiquities, some as old as 4,000 years, in an area around
the modern town of Gönen, north of the city of Isparta, where ancient Konane was situated. Many of these items were
left behind by the Perisans, Lydians, Phrygians, Greeks, Macedonians, Romans and other conquerors who made
their way between Europe and Asia.

The faculty and students also were a part of an interdisciplinary
and multinational team of the Isparta Archaeological Survey (IAS) project.

The team found pottery fragments, ancient glass or metal work, bones with carvings, and even a coin, which date from
2000 B.C. to the Ottoman period. Also discovered were 35 inscriptions that include two new Roman milestones and
a dedication to the Roman emperors Severus and Galerius, which Iversen is studying.

The students, Nathan Bensing, Jeremy Ondo, Philip Trochowski and Anna Wieser, gained field experience in drawing,
tagging, cleaning and documenting, including photographing, their finds. With the help of Ann Holstein from Case Western Reserve's
Kelvin Smith Library, students had the opportunity to learn the rudiments of ArcGIS technology to analyze collected materials.

The researchers will publish the first season's results in Colloquium Anatolian, the journal of the Turkish
Institute of Archaeology.